


Don't Worry

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gamzee Can't Die, Human AU, Neglect, Other, angst and possible insanity, cursed destiny, ghost story, gods and puppets, lots of dying, sinister brothers, that's the real kicker right there, there's also a stuffed animal cat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-10
Updated: 2014-06-10
Packaged: 2018-02-04 02:54:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1763449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gamzee’s bones were brittle and cold when he was born.  He was barely alive at all. Kurloz glanced into his cradle and thought about how busy everything had been leading up to the birth of this small, faded creature, all huge heavy eyes and rasping breath.  Gamzee was plugged into a lot of machines; he was stabbed and swabbed by a lot of doctors.  Kurloz hadn’t been able to go home for what felt like days and days.<br/>“He’s so sweet, sleeping,” Kurloz’s mother said, but he wasn’t, really.  He was struggling.  He was barely there.<br/>Kurloz was young, yes, but even he knew that.<br/>Instead he said, “Don’t worry, Mama.  Gamzee can’t die.”<br/>And Lil Cal, draped over Kurloz’s shoulders, surprisingly heavy for a puppet and with breath so, so cold it couldn’t have been possible, may have whispered back, “Gamzee can’t die.  That’s such a nice wish.  You’re a nice boy, Kurloz.”<br/>“I am,” Kurloz agreed.<br/>He didn’t think it was a big deal.<br/>It wasn’t, not for a long time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Worry

Gamzee’s bones were brittle and cold when he was born. He was barely alive at all. Kurloz glanced into his cradle and thought about how busy everything had been leading up to the birth of this small, faded creature, all huge heavy eyes and rasping breath. Gamzee was plugged into a lot of machines; he was stabbed and swabbed by a lot of doctors. Kurloz hadn’t been able to go home for what felt like days and days. He was still small enough to carry around a coloring book and crayons, though he preferred drawing dizzy patterns in ink. He knew a lot of riddles and jokes. He got in trouble for telling lies, sometimes. 

His father’s voice got a little strange and deep, looking down at his tiny son and all those machines. Then he left, the old goat. He shoved the door open with his shoulder and didn’t even look at Kurloz. His mother pressed her lips together and said, “We’ve named him ‘Gamzee,’ dear. Maybe you should talk to him. Help him pull through.” She sounded kind of like someone on a kids’ television program. 

“Gamzee,” Kurloz echoed. He watched the little creature twitch, like he was having a nightmare. Kurloz knew all about nightmares, and hey, maybe they did look something alike. It was the dusky skin; it was the hair so dark it was almost blue, almost purple. It was the thick freckles under the eyes and over the nose, looking just a little like splotches of paint. This child had barely even cried. Maybe Kurloz felt a little sorry. 

“He’s so sweet, sleeping,” Kurloz’s mother said, but he wasn’t, really. He was struggling. He was barely there. 

Kurloz was young, yes, but even he knew that. 

Instead he said, “Don’t worry, Mama. Gamzee can’t die.” 

And Lil Cal, draped over Kurloz’s shoulders, surprisingly heavy for a puppet and with breath so, so cold it couldn’t have been possible, may have whispered back, “Gamzee can’t die. That’s such a nice wish. You’re a nice boy, Kurloz.” 

“I am,” Kurloz agreed. 

He didn’t think it was a big deal. 

It wasn’t, not for a long time. 

For now, his mom said, “Mm?” but Kurloz shook his head. His mom had gotten Cal at a garage sale, shoved into her arms by a pale boy with weird red eyes. She said she shouldn’t have brought him home. She said he was really kind of ugly and there were so many nicer toys her son could play with. She didn’t know what had made her buy him. It was too late, now. There he was, plain as day, sewn from rough, scratchy fabric that wouldn’t cut even if you tried to mess it up with scissors. He was always there. He hung himself up in Kurloz’s cubby at daycare when he didn’t remember bringing him. He’d hidden inside Kurloz’s coat in his closet, refusing to move for so long that Kurloz had to leave his jacket there and wear three sweaters instead. 

Gamzee’s breath evened out slowly, and they were able to wind the tubes out of his tiny nose. The sweat finally dried on his head, and his hair was curly like Kurloz’s. He was probably going to be a good brother. When he opened his eyes, Kurloz smiled at him and wrinkled up his nose. 

Gamzee curled his tiny fists into the sheets of his new teeny baby cot – he would still be at the hospital for a little while longer, and his mother wanted to wait with him. Their dad got yelled at over the phone, but then he came back and Kurloz got to go home. He slept in his own bed, arms wrapped around himself. He woke up thrashing and wailing and crying, but later on he wouldn’t remember the dream. He almost never did. He got a cup of water that tasted like soap and tucked himself back into bed like there was nothing wrong. Cal was sitting on top of his bookshelf that night, holding _Aunt Isabel Tells a Good One_ open on his lap. That was one of Kurloz’s favorites; he knew he’d read it later in Cal’s voice. 

When Gamzee came home, he was a wild child, screaming and giggling and grabbing people’s fingers so hard it kind of hurt. When he got big enough he waddled around and tore pages out of Kurloz’s books, glossy black curls tumbling into his face and bouncing as he ran, teeth poking through the thick red of his gums so hard and sharp they looked like baby fangs. He learned all their names early on – Mama, Daddy, Kurloz, Cal – though it took him a while to say anything else. 

Their mom talked about throwing the puppet away sometimes, but she never actually got around to it. Once she had him halfway down to the dumpster at the end of the driveway but ended up swiveling around on her heel and marching right back. She said she realized she may have left the stove on, but Kurloz thought that was a fib. 

When Gamzee was four he fell off the counter and landed on his head. Kurloz had been upstairs in his room – he heard the crash and expected a scream. Nothing came. 

Fear trickled down his back, threading its way like a cold, numb splash through to his fingers. Gamzee followed him around and tugged on his hand with sticky fingers – he played with the rings Kurloz wore and traced the bone decals on his hoodie while they talked. He stole soda for Kurloz from the fridge whenever he asked, because their mom was much less likely to get mad if she caught him. 

There should have been a scream. 

When Kurloz got downstairs, Gamzee was sitting up in a pool of his own blood, head a mess of red like a can of paint had fallen on him, holding what might have been a piece of his skull in his hand. As Kurloz watched he pressed it up to his head like he thought maybe it would slide back into place. 

“You’re okay, brother,” Kurloz said, and Gamzee actually was. Somehow the doctors glued and safety pinned him back together. He swung his feet sitting in the waiting room. Kurloz read aloud to him from a boring magazine article about tropical plants. 

Their father screamed a little, seeing him, and Gamzee told him it was alright. It had been dad’s turn to watch Gamzee, after all – keep him out of trouble, lasso his playful, wandering little ass back into the playroom or whatever. It should have been nice to hear it was alright. 

Their mother left their father about a year later, and it was probably because of the way he held her son’s hand in the hospital bed because he felt responsible and not because he really knew how the little boy must feel there, blinking up at the picture of a happy kitten on the ceiling. The nurses tossed the pair of them lots of suspicious, sidelong looks and treated both their parents like they were really dirty. Letting their little son wander off the counter, with only Kurloz to listen for a scream? Barely more than a little boy himself, with Insane Clown Posse on his iPod? 

_Nice going. Good job._

Those were things their mom hissed at their father when she stormed out to drive Kurloz to school the day she decided that house wasn’t her home anymore. Her breath still smelled like the mouthwash she and dad shared, stuck between the dual sinks in their bathroom. She clenched Kurloz’s arm tight, so tight, leaning on him for support – he was much too old now for her to hold his hand. He kept his fists balled up in his pockets and stared his dad in the face with dead eyes. 

Sure, the world is complicated and she might have left for a lot of reasons. It might have been the weird grown-up talks Kurloz tuned out, or the stiffs in suits who showed up to check that the house was secure, that Gamzee was at daycare or whatever. Maybe. But it was probably the way their dad had held Gamzee’s hand all limp and self-conscious in that hospital bed. It made sense. Kurloz could have asked, but he didn’t. 

He and Gamzee moved in with their mother. It was a long, long time before they saw their dad again, and they ate oatmeal some mornings and Kurloz tried wearing skull makeup to school and Gamzee grew out of shows like _Dora the Explorer_ and into Kurloz’s worn out _Goosebumps_ books. 

Their mom’s house had big windows with papery yellow curtains. It smelled like dish soap and burnt toast, with a faint, faint hint of kitty litter. Kurloz met a girl volunteering at the shelter he really liked, and so they had two cats – Meulin was persuasive, but so was he. She came over to visit a lot and draped her legs over his lap and ruffled Gamzee’s hair. She pinched his round little cheeks and said “Oh my god, sweetie.” She called him sweetie even when he got older and his cheekbones could give you a paper cut. 

Things were okay there. Gamzee helped their mom in the garden. Kurloz did the taxes because Gamzee kept breaking the computer. Nobody cropped their dad out of any of the family pictures, and of course their mom left Cal with Dad, kicked under the bed so neither of her boys would think to pack him. 

Kurloz might have said, “He’s like my shadow, brother.” 

Gamzee was sometimes bullied in kindergarten, and he might have said, “It’d suck to get left behind on purpose.” 

Neither of them realized Cal wasn’t in any of the boxes, not until they had new toys. It was okay. Kurloz didn’t have any more nightmares. Gamzee didn’t call the puppet his “best friend.” 

They went to visit their dad one summer, though, right after Gamzee’s first year at high school. They visited because their grandparents would be there, and the higher ups bickered and their mother cried and used her sleeve as a handkerchief. She yelled at their dad over the phone again and it was sort of like old times, like times way before Gamzee would remember. 

Gamzee packed for both of them, and forgot the toothpaste. Kurloz didn’t take his headphones off the whole drive to the lake house, that old splinter-board beast with a shambling, lopsided roof and mildew stains on the wood. It belonged to his grandparents – it belonged to his childhood. It was squished up against the green-mud lake. Kurloz watched it through narrowed eyes; it creaked into view just as he remembered, but older and scuffed up and shedding even more of its paint job. 

Gamzee said, “We should go swimming, right? Shit, did I forget our swimsuits?” He mouthed the word “Motherfucking” before “swimsuits.” He’d only just learned the word and was still a bit uncomfortable saying it in the car. Before the week with Dad was over, it would be every other word, Kurloz knew. Gamzee didn’t have many memories of cracking his skull open as a little kid. He was a straight C student – Kurloz thought he probably cheated off of convenient nearby friends. 

They waved to their mother and she blew them kisses. Kurloz shrugged off a strange, forlorn feeling. He tried to turn it into anger, but it was difficult. 

Gamzee offered hugs to Dad and both their grandparents; his sweatpants were baggy on him and looked sort of dopey. He had the goofy smile of a boy who still sometimes thought rainbows were cool and the “Miracles” song was actually inspiring. Kurloz steered him into the house and up the stairs; there were birds on the path and pictures of the same sort of birds in the hall. The old guest room where Kurloz used to stay was ready for them, small and damp as ever, a sketchy colored pencil drawing of a dancing clown on the wall. Lil Cal was on the bed, legs splayed, golden tooth catching a little light. As they watched, his jaw seemed to open and close, just once, maybe too fast to be real. Maybe a trick of the light. 

Kurloz only thought it was real because he shook his head and Gamzee took a step back at the same time. They met each other’s eyes. 

“That old doll,” Kurloz said. “Shit, he was ours. When we were kids.” 

“I remember him, dude,” Gamzee said. His eyes were round and dark and soft. “Didn’t you used to read me bedtime stories in his voice? _Aunt Isabel Tells a Good One._ ” 

“Nah, I never did that,” Kurloz said. If you’d asked him years ago, so many years and classes and normal, boring-ass days ago, he’d have said maybe Cal read to him, too, sometimes, late at night when neither of their parents would think to do it. When it felt like all the world was sleeping. 

Kurloz took the bed with Cal sitting on it; for a second he imagined himself batting the puppet onto the ground and kicking it out of sight– he didn’t know it, but he’d have looked just like his mom if he’d given it a shot. Her teeth ached, then, and her knuckles were white. It was difficult, more difficult than it should have been. 

He picked Cal up and put him on the windowsill, instead. It was a safer choice. He and Gamzee played Scrabble and lost to their grandfather. Their grandmother coaxed them into the water and helped Gamzee catch tadpoles, squirming between his long, bony fingers. He got his face all splattered with mud; there was a dot on his nose that reminded Kurloz of how he’d done his brother’s clown makeup, goofy and simple and sweet compared to his own. They didn’t really talk to their dad. It wasn’t clear if he wanted to talk to them. He read a book and took a boat out onto the lake. 

When they slept, Cal’s shadow spread its way from the windowsill and crept across their beds. 

It was like an old, familiar voice, half-heard through a crowd but growing louder. 

Kurloz didn’t think it was a big deal. 

He didn’t dream that night, but his nightmares were back the night after that. He woke choking on breaths for the first time in years. He didn’t think he’d been very loud, but Gamzee got him a cup of water that tasted like pond and offered to make coffee instead if he wanted it. Morning wasn’t so far away. He kneaded his fist into his eye like a little kid might. 

“Go to sleep, motherfucker,” Kurloz said, and Gamzee obeyed. He scrunched himself into a little ball, his feet sticking out just a bit from under the blankets. He snored, and his hair tangled and stuck to his forehead. 

Kurloz rested his chin on his knees; his eyes felt like they did when he scrubbed paint into them on accident. He may have dreamed. 

Cal said, “You’re a nice boy, Kurloz.” 

Kurloz didn’t say anything. 

…

It started when the wind was sticky and warm, carrying rain and the small, whizzing sort of bugs that you had to blink out of your eyes a lot. Kurloz didn’t remark on Gamzee scooping Cal up off the windowsill; his brother was quirky, thank goodness. He had two good friends at school, so far as Kurloz had heard, and then a bunch of people he called “friend” who might not know his name. Gamzee draped Cal over his shoulder the way Kurloz used to carry him. 

All Kurloz had to say was, “I’m taking the last of the orange juice.” 

Gamzee offered a half-hearted, sing-song, “Noooo.” Just trying to play along. 

It was a quiet day, at first. They went to a fair a bit down the road, closer to town – the lake sort of shivered here, like it was trying to shake insects off its back. Gamzee carried Cal everywhere. Sometimes when Kurloz glanced at him he was nodding, nodding or mouthing words to himself. He was crooked and tense, looking like he did when he was trying really hard to remember the lyrics to a song or something. 

They bought roasted almonds and Kurloz won a stuffed lizard for Meulin. He swapped it out for a bigger, softer, lopsided sort of cat when the guy running the booth wasn’t looking. 

It was when he tried to switch Lil Cal and the floppy cat – just a joke, mind – when something snapped. One moment Cal was docile and limp in Kurloz’s hands and the next he could have sworn he felt that little doll’s ribs. And Gamzee – 

Gamzee whipped around, and his face was mottled and blue-grey, his lips shriveled and gasping and pale. The face of a baby who flickered out with tubes in his nose, breath that couldn’t quite make it to his brain. Yet here he was, that baby stretched too long, nearly full-grown and snarling. His eyes were huge, yellowed and scared – his hair was clotted blood, the skull split open. It looked, then, for a second, like a can of paint had been turned over on his head, just as it had seemed before. Kurloz could almost imagine himself back in their old kitchen. 

“Don’t you motherfucking dare,” Gamzee said, just a little whisper. And then a roar – _“Don’t you motherfucking dare touch my friend, motherfucker._ The things he’s telling me. _The things he’s telling me._ ” 

But it was only a second. Then Gamzee was blinking, bleary, and Kurloz handed him the puppet back. He didn’t have to do that. Perhaps if he’d left it under one of these stalls it would fall into someone else’s hands. Perhaps he could hang it up with those stuffed animals people won for playing inane games, and it would be gone forever and ever and they could forget. 

Only Kurloz didn’t want to. He was smiling, his head tilted just a little to the side, the sun hot on the back of his neck. People were staring and so he led Gamzee away, practically dragging him towards the lake. 

That night Kurloz dreamt, but he couldn’t wake up. He was aware of his physical self – the real boy tucked into bed, all stringy tendons and cracking bones– and that self was thrashing, legs tangled up in sweaty sheets, fingernails digging into his palms. He felt his palms bleed. His ears ached with screams that didn’t belong to him – they came from his own throat, but they weren’t his, somehow. His eyes bulged, like the veins in his fever-tight neck. Kurloz stood above himself, watching spittle fly from his own lips. 

He couldn’t wake up. Gamzee wasn’t in bed, so he went to look for him. 

He was down by the lake, holding Cal up to his ear to hear him better. Their father was out rowing his way through a dull, aching mist. There were still-wet beer bottles waiting on the shore. 

Gamzee dropped Cal into the mud, and Kurloz flinched; Gamzee called, “Dad! Yo Dad! Hey!” Nothing happened. Of course nothing happened. Their dad was a shadow, if even that. 

Gamzee waded into the water without even kicking off his shoes – his arms were spread wide like a tightrope walker’s, his eyes closed. Pious. His sweatpants ballooned, goofy as ever, but a faint sheen of moonlight through fog glistened on his hair. It made him look almost important, almost like he was supposed to be there. Kurloz imagined the moonlight would’ve looked regal lighting up his own hair, down there in the wet, with mosquitos nibbling his skin, mud and fish both twisting against his ankles. He didn’t know what it meant, really, but he wondered why he wasn’t the one center stage right now, with Gamzee watching from the porch. 

Cal wasn’t in the mud anymore – he’d found his way to Kurloz’s shoulders, a dead weight still somehow just as heavy as he’d been when Kurloz was only a boy. It was dream-logic, Kurloz reasoned. It was fine. 

Gamzee walked in so far his face was lost under the water, his arms flapping like he thought maybe he could fly. Maybe he could swim; maybe he could raise himself from that ripe, stinking deep. But no, no he couldn’t, not for a long time. His arms stilled first, and then the water. His breath burbled to the surface for a little while longer, but then he was no more. 

Still their father circled the lake, taking long swigs from a bottle he held trapped between his thighs. He sang low and deep and sweet. Somehow Kurloz could hear him, even from so far away. 

Still Kurloz waited, as if for some holy sign. Should he act? Long ago he ran thudding and furious down the stairs to Gamzee, to his brother shattered in the kitchen. He’d been something like terrified. Where was that little boy, now? He was still wearing a hoodie with bones printed on it, but now he blinked and held very still. 

When Gamzee dragged himself out of the water he was bleeding from his caved-in skull and he had water weeds wrapped around his ankles like they’d been trying to drag him down and down. He rose and laughed, because of course he couldn’t die. It was a given. He laughed like he was choking, like he was sobbing, and he spat green water and mud. Kurloz lifted a hand and found tears on his own cheek, but he didn’t move to stop him, to call for him, to scream, “911! Help! Suicide!” like someone else might. 

It wasn’t suicide, after all. Gamzee watched the water, half boy, half scab. He looked over his shoulder back at Kurloz, back at the house, back at Cal, and he smiled. Their father didn’t notice, somehow. Or perhaps he did. Their mother always had called him crazy, said ghost-visions and shit popped up along their family tree like sores on skin. Maybe he saw people like Gamzee all the time, and that’s why he always ran away so fast. 

Kurloz thought probably not. 

He didn’t wake up that night, or at least he didn’t think so. He kept expecting to – he trotted down to meet Gamzee on the beach, pebbles rough on his bare feet. His old hoodie became a towel, but Gamzee wouldn’t let him scrub any of the mud off his face. He shook and snarled and hunched, so he was finally a little shorter than Kurloz again. 

They’d been mistaken for twins before, even with Gamzee so young. 

“It really worked,” Gamzee said. “It fucking fell together like… Like I don’t know, a puzzle. My motherfucking head hurts.” And louder, “ _I hurt._ ” 

“You can’t die,” Kurloz agreed. “I thought so as a kid.” It wasn’t hard to stay calm. In that moment, calm felt like his default state, like anything else would be ripples on stone. 

“Hey, Dad!” Gamzee tried, again. 

“Shut up,” Kurloz said. 

When they got back upstairs his body wasn’t twitching and screaming in the bed anymore – better not to wake up the grandparents, anyway. Sweatpants were all pretty much the same. Gamzee changed, and his skull sort of reformed in the shower, bones sprouting and skin stitching itself together. Kurloz made coffee that Gamzee ended up pouring down the drain. If Kurloz had had his phone handy, he might have taken a picture of his brother there, bent over the sink with Lil Cal clamped around his neck, his hair stuck in wet, jagged curls and his eyes so swollen. He looked like something out of a Tim Burton movie. That was one of Kurloz’s favorite compliments to give. 

Kurloz started hearing Cal’s voice again that day, just soft at the edge of his mind so the words blurred and sputtered out all too often. 

Cal was talking to Gamzee, not him, after all, and something about that was sick and cruel and colder than the puppet’s sour breath. 

He kept saying the Angel of Double-Death, which made Gamzee flinch and Kurloz think of the lofty gold-spun images he associated with the Book of Revelations. Death on a white horse, and all that; a sky swimming with monsters and seas boiling blood. That thought – _Double-Death, Double-Death_ – thudded in his head like a pulse. It was a heartbeat of a word. Gamzee played Scrabble with their grandparents again, Cal sitting on the chair next to him. Kurloz watched; he drew dizzy patterns in ink on the newspaper just like he did on all his school notebooks. Good luck reading the sports section. 

Gamzee tried to joke around and play Grandma’s Little Clown, but it looked painful. He kept saying something about a headache and downed Advil like breath mints. 

Their father asked Kurloz what grade he was in, and Kurloz said, “Eleventy-first grade. Like Bilbo Baggins.” 

Their father asked if he was seeing a girl or boy or anyone, if he saw anyone at all at school, and Kurloz said he had picked up a bigass cat plushie, hadn’t he? 

Their father asked if he liked books, and he said he liked them better than people but not so much as puppets. 

He didn’t like his dad’s red eyes or his simpering, shaky voice, like a goat bleating. Kurloz just wanted to draw his sick and winding spirals. He wanted to listen for almost-voices and wait for Gamzee to answer them. 

Later on, Gamzee would say he’d tried to talk to Dad about this buddy of his, about the hilarious way he got banished from the science fair, about anything, really, but it hadn’t worked out. Kurloz would say, “I know, bro, me too,” and they’d sort of grin at each other. Old song and dance, really. Kurloz would be looking at the puppet over Gamzee’s shoulder, and Gamzee would be squeezing the banister so hard his bones shifted and hurt. 

“We fucking _failed_ this trip, man,” Gamzee said. 

“Not our fault,” Kurloz said. “At least we know he’s okay.” 

Gamzee rolled his eyes. 

When they went back home, of course they brought the puppet, and things weren’t quite the same. 

…

The Angel of Double-Death was worse than Kurloz’s nightmares, and he loved him for it. He was a universe howling and ready to bleed out – he was all the rage of the galaxies’ worth of spirits that died and couldn’t wake up again, that couldn’t come home. He was a thousand eyes, plastic and cold but watching though they could not live. He was ready to come to this universe. Or had he always been here, eager for someone to awake his final judgment? 

He was inside Lil Cal. He was inside Gamzee, just waiting to peel back his tissue paper skull. 

That’s what the voice said, and at first Kurloz wanted to call it an ugly dream, an unfair dream, because wasn’t Gamzee the little brat who used to think it was cool to write people sappy poems for their birthdays? Hadn’t he put a foot through Kurloz’s door once in a rage and taped a piece of paper with a smiley face over it in hopes he wouldn’t notice? They went to the library and Gamzee tried rearranging the books based on which had the most colorful covers, so they got ushered back to the kids’ section pretty quickly. 

This was his baby brother, still too young to drive, and Kurloz would have said it was too much to ask of him, sure. 

He’d have also said the Angel of Double-Death was such a lofty title, and look at those twisted death-stark wings, those slick bones dripping feathers, threaded with withered vines, with gold. Wasn’t this a better story than he’d expected from his silly little life? He was scared, sure he was, but it was fear like glitter, like fireworks. It was too bright, and he couldn’t look away. Perhaps it just didn’t feel real. That’s what Kurloz thought over and over like a prayer whenever he began to wonder if he was mad, if he was cruel. 

Whenever he began to scare himself – this just doesn’t feel real, does it? 

And really, even if it was, Kurloz was already so much more than he had been, once. He was growing so wonderfully far away. 

They saw the world as it would be every time they slept. Perhaps Gamzee saw more, but it hardly mattered. Their earth had been born and molded for this sacrifice. It was an offering strapped squirming on the altar stone of space – star-flecked marble – and blood-rivers would make the plants grow richer than before. 

Kurloz saw a kingdom. He saw humanity go up in skull-searing white light, screaming praises to a creature that would not fall before guns and armies, a creature hit with atomic weapons only to rise from the smoldering pit and click its bones back into place. Its – his – face was skeletal, painted like a clown’s, though he only smiled like a clown might sometimes, and that’s when he spoke with the angel’s voice. His bone wings grew redder and redder as the people died, and his face grew more and more terrible. It was hard to look at him, he was so beautiful. They built him mad, shambling temples, and crowded in tents to hear him speak – they stained the ground with their juices for him, and they knew he would claim their souls. 

The Angel of Double Death wore his hair in Gamzee’s curls, but he was far more than Gamzee would have ever been. Cal said. Cal said, and it was true. Gamzee would grow old working a dead-end job, scraping by with a handful of numbers saved in his cellphone. He would clean things, or he would make things, and people’s eyes would slide over him, almost embarrassed by how widely he smiled. Perhaps he would be loved; perhaps he would marry. In the end they would die, and he would not. Gamzee could not die. 

Gamzee would have to lose this stumbling self eventually. He’d lose himself after centuries of living, and there would be no honor, no worship, no truth. 

Wasn’t it enough to have a holy purpose? 

Wouldn’t that give reason to all this pain in his head? 

If the world had to be dragged down, why not at his hand? 

Perhaps he would be loved; perhaps he would marry. An angel chooses who lives, and Kurloz saw their kingdom spread wide and laughing, full of voices, a pantheon plucked from among their friends. There would be a price, sure, and they would mourn like any gods would. Of course they would mourn, and then they would have cities built anew, and then they would have cities built on distant moons. 

Kurloz saw himself a step in front of the angel, and why his lips were sewn shut in these dreamings he did not know. 

It made him realize how little he would miss his voice in life; he liked the self in his mind more than the greasy-haired kid he saw in the mirror. 

He made a point of smiling silently, now, and lurking sometimes on the edge of conversations. Gamzee shoved his arm and said, “Cut that mime shit out, brother. We don’t need it.” 

Gamzee started taking pills, all the pills he could grab out of people’s pockets and swipe from the medicine cabinet. He started smoking weed and locking himself in his room. He wrote poetry on the walls – he finger-painted rainbows with his eyes closed, and never noticed Kurloz coming by to watch him. He hid Cal under his bed some days, and wore him triumphantly on his back all through others. He was a mixed bag. He would hug you and sigh or he would tell you exactly where you should put your good intentions. 

Kurloz hated Gamzee’s poems, just like he always had, but it was fine. At night he saw his brother prove his loyalties, and it didn’t matter when their mother caught him with nasty shit in his pockets, and it didn’t matter that he’d tried to cry to show her he understood the severity of the situation but there were no tears left in him to speak of. It didn’t matter that their father assured her over the phone that he hadn’t brought Cal to the lake house at all. 

The day Gamzee’s best friend shook his hand off his shoulder and said, “I have better conversations with myself than I’ve had with you lately. Where’s your head, dipshit? What’s with the puppet? Old Gamzee was dumb and pathetic, but you’re… I don’t even want to get into what you are,” led sweetly into the night Gamzee dreamt of that same friend leading a revolution against him. Where he saw a struggling hero, Kurloz saw blasphemy. Karkat – that was the kid’s name – shot the angel down with quivering hands, tears running down his cheeks, teeth bared and wet and salty. 

“This is for stealing my friend!” he may have said, or maybe it was, “And to think _you_ were my friend!” 

Kurloz and Gamzee disagreed, talking about it later. 

Kurloz didn’t really see the big deal. The kid was still sniveling and frail as an adult, and his bullets just lodged in Gamzee’s dusty chest to wait out eternity; in those flashes of rage where his true self peeked through Gamzee was mostly bullets and jutting blades, scabs and tattered flesh anyway. 

That and the wings, of course. 

He had no eyes. He had no skin. 

Karkat didn’t either, by the time the Angel of Double Death was through with him. 

That’s when Gamzee asked Lil Cal if he was the devil, and the puppet just laughed and said he wasn’t sure he believed in such a thing. Gamzee asked if Cal could let him die before any of this ruling, this god-ing actually happened. Cal said he wasn’t sure he believed such a thing was possible. 

This is the true truth, he said, and Gamzee said no. 

It took a lot. It took a world of the dead and the dying. He said no. 

“Maybe I can’t die,” he said. “Maybe I’m a motherfucking mistake that can’t die and, like, isn’t even really alive now. Maybe I’m fucking insane and this is all Kurloz just twisting my head up in knots. I wrote about him doing that on my wall.” 

“I’m not doing anything to you, man,” Kurloz said. “What are you doing?” 

“Remember when we were kids and you said I was boring?” 

Kurloz smiled. 

Gamzee kept going. There was that new tic in his lip, again, like a flinch, like a smirk. “Remember when you were, like, trying to get me to do tricks for you? And I was all… I was like, ‘What can I do, bro? How can I be better?’ Well I did all that shit. I’ve done that shit and I’m trying to do this. But. But I think I’d rather be a fucked up, morbid, _stupid_ basket case and get my ass locked away forever than believe in this reality you preach. I have to believe there’s something more than this.” 

“But there isn’t,” Cal said. 

Kurloz said, “Like what?” 

Gamzee seethed. “Another angel, maybe. Death and life. Something good. Something so the monsters don’t win. The only gods can’t, like, just _all_ be motherfucking monsters. If I don’t believe in a miracle here, man, I don’t know if I can live this future.” 

“You don’t have a choice,” Cal said. “You can’t die.” 

“You said that, motherfucker.” Gamzee was so quiet, now. “ _You said that, and I’m getting pretty fucking tired of hearing it._ I will not be the monster at the end of this book.” 

“Maybe you always were,” Kurloz said. Smiling. Helpful. 

The look Gamzee tossed him would have sizzled up the ocean. 

Cal said it was like in _Aunt Isabel Tells a Good One,_ that book from so long ago and far away. There have to be monsters in the cave or there’s no point in heroes going there. There has to be darkness or there’s no story. 

When you’re the angel there’s nothing to fear. You can edit your stories, O humanity, but what are they, in the end, without their monsters? 

“Happy,” Gamzee said, and he ripped the puppet’s head off just like that. 

Cal bled into the carpet; his stuffing inside was soaked red. Kurloz wasn’t surprised – perhaps he’d always kind of known there was a rotten heart somewhere in there. 

Gamzee tossed Cal’s head into the wastebasket and went, “Tch.” 

For the first time in weeks, there were no voices. Just for a moment – a still, soft, simple moment, like Kurloz had assured himself wouldn’t come again. 

And then a whisper, so very, very, very, _very_ soft, it might not have been real at all. 

Gamzee didn’t seem to hear it. He was poking at the bloodstains on the carpet with his shoe. 

The whisper said, “Don’t worry, Kurloz – he’s not a very nice boy, but he’s going to have to do. You’re nice, aren’t you?” 

“I am,” Kurloz agreed. 

“What?” Gamzee barked. 

“Maybe you can help me,” Cal said. “Help us. You know what it is to be king.” 

“I do,” Kurloz liked this turn of conversation. He almost went and got Cal’s head out of the trashcan, but that could wait. He would have to be fast, now. 

“You’ve always been a king.” 

That was it. Kurloz took a lamp off the side table, dragging its wires behind it, and clobbered Gamzee in the head. It was a sickening crunch; it was shattered ceramic floral print and tasty little shards to vacuum up later. It helped that he’d never struck his brother before; Gamzee went down easy, landing like a sack of potatoes, bent like a doll tossed down the stairs. He didn’t blink or shake himself off. He didn’t wake up. It was okay. 

Kurloz was sure he could never really stop breathing. 

He hadn’t known what to do until he was doing it. 

He flipped Gamzee onto his stomach and looked at his back, at his pimply brown skin and Jack Skellington bones, a skeleton king with his arm bent underneath him like he was clutching at his heart. 

There were smudges by his shoulder blades, big, ripe stains, all red and swollen at the edges like Gamzee had been scratching. 

It was time to dig out his wings.

**Author's Note:**

> hello, and thanks for reading~ <3 
> 
> I'm afraid this is stuffed full of shameless headcanons/babbling about a re-interpretation of the Makaras and their religion. :P I hope you enjoyed it!
> 
> Aunt Isabel Tells a Good One is a book by Kate Duke that I grew up with.


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